Laughing Boy by Oliver LaFarge

             Laughing Boy is another of the great novels that I would never have heard of if I had not been collecting and reading the works that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  Laughing Boy can, perhaps, be described as “A Navajo Tragedy.”  Written in 1929 by La Farge who had been an anthropologist among the Navajo and other tribes of the Southwest, the book struck me as a rather authentic story of the impact of American culture on the Navajo people.  It was told by a white man living among the Indians and may have many inaccuracies and misinterpretations.  I have read some critiques of Laughing Boy that express the opinion that no white man can ever understand Indian culture.  Be that as it may, La Farge made a good effort and tells a story that was honored with a Pulitzer Prize and is well worth reading. 

I had strong feelings for the young Navajo man, Laughing Boy, as he encountered for the first time some of most damaging aspects of the Americans who had come to live in the Southwest.  The story tells of his meeting Slim Girl, a Navajo woman who had been taken from her family as a young girl and sent to a school for Indians in California.  When she finally made her way back to Navajo country, she found that she was neither American or Navajo.  She enticed Laughing Boy, a traditional Navajo, into marriage in order to help her find a way back to the Navajo way of life.  Instead, she led him into some of the worst aspects of American life.  With Slim Girl mixing drinks, Laughing Boy has his first taste of whiskey.  It’s a poignant moment when you realize how often this must have happened to Indian people who would become slaves to alcohol and ruined by its influence. 

Slim Girl tries to live in two worlds: the Navajo world with Laughing Boy and the American world with a man who pays her for sleeping with him.  She goes off during the day to clean house for the minister’s wife, as she tells Laughing Boy, but actually goes to meet her wealthy American.  Slim Girl justifies this by believing that she is getting even with the Americans who took her life away from her.  Laughing Boy eventually finds out about her double life, catches her with the American, and then reacts.  This is where real trouble begins. 
I won't give away anymore of the story but it has a  tragic ending.  Laughing Boy's faith and religious conviction from his Navajo upbringing and way of life help him go through what he has to face. Laughing Boy is a strong statement about how much good is in the traditional Navajo way of life.  Even if there are inaccuracies, Laughing Boy conveys the evil that was brought to the Navajos because of the Americans encroaching into their world and way of life.  This is an important book to read, especially by Americans who have grown up believing that the Indians were just savages who deserved to be run off their lands and herded onto reservations. 

Another of my favorite Pulitzer winners- Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin

Scarlet Sister Mary by Julia Peterkin, 1928, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1929.

I was fortunate to learn of this book from the list of winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Scarlet Sister Mary was written by Julia Peterkin who was the mistress of a former plantation in South Carolina named Lang Syne. She had lived on the plantation for 30 years prior to writing Scarlet Sister Mary. She gives an account of the former slaves and their descendants who once were the property of the plantations of South Carolina. In Peterkin’s book, the slaves, though emancipated in the Civil War, stayed on the plantation and worked for the owner or tried being share croppers. The African-American workers even lived in the former slave quarters. Scarlet Sister Mary was the daughter of a slave who had been born in the quarters. The book gives a fascinating glimpse into the lives of these people who were free to leave their old life but chose, in many cases, to stay on the land and do the work they knew. In Peterkin’s book, the plantation was very isolated and this may account for why the former slaves found it easier to stay where they were rather than venture out into the world.

One of the themes of Scarlet Sister Mary is the story of some young men and women leaving the plantation and seeking work, education, and sometimes pleasure in the world. In Mary’s case, her husband July left her shortly after they were married. Mary had a baby boy to take care of. July does not return for 20 years and when he does come back, she won’t take him back. Sister Mary gets the “Scarlet” added to her name because of the scarlet sins she commits as she goes through life supporting herself and her child with short-term relationships with a variety of men. In the process, they provide her with eight more children.

Because of her sins which the little community knows about, Mary is put out of her church by a vote of the deacons. Her struggle to finally be saved again, by vote of the deacons, forms much of her story. However, her desire to be a good Christian is set against her beliefs in the old ways, dating back to slavery times and possibly back to Africa. The people in the village believed in black magic, spells, conjurers, and other superstitions that somehow co-existed with their Christian beliefs. Mary’s struggle was between these two forces. She had a love-charm made Daddy Cudjoe that brought many men to her and perpetuated her sinful life. At the end of the book, Mary experiences another religious conversion brought on by the death of her son. But even after her conversion and re-acceptance into the church, Mary is unwilling to give up her love charm. Daddy Cudjoe asks her to give back the powerful “conjure rag” now that she is going to quit with men. Though scarlet no more, Sister Mary refuses and says it is all she has to keep her young. Her struggles with men and the struggle between living as a good Christian woman and a woman with special powers continues.

Scarlet Sister Mary is interesting, in part, because the dialog in the book is written as the people spoke. This seems authentic because Julia Peterkin lived around the descendants of slaves on her own plantation. She would have heard how they spoke and capture it in her novel. The message of Scarlet Sister Mary seems to be that Black women have had to be strong in many of their family situations. Mary had to be strong but also rely on her community and church as she raised her children. Scarlet Sister Mary gave me some good insights into what it might have been like for the freed slaves and their descendants in the years following the Civil War. The effects of slavery were not easily or quickly overcome.

Some interesting information about Pulitzer-winning authors

Young Ernest Hemingway as an ambulance driver in Italian Army in WWI - Inspiration for A Farewell to Arms


Ever since I started collecting and reading the books that have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, I have also been interested in the authors of these award-winning works. Since 1918 when the prize was first awarded to Ernest Poole for His Family, there have been 84 works of fiction given the Pulitzer Prize up through 2010. If no work of fiction was judged to meet the criteria of the Pulitzer Prize in a given year, no award was given. This was the case in 1920, 1941, 1946, 1954, 1957, 1964, 1971, 1974, and 1977. However, in 1957 an honorary Pulitzer award was given to Kenneth Roberts in the year he died for his outstanding historical novels including Arundel (1930) and Northwest Passage (1937). Over the years 53 men and 28 women for a total of 81 have been the winning authors. This number does not add up to the 84 works of fiction that have won the award. The explanation for this discrepancy is that three authors won the Pulitzer for two of their books: Booth Tarkington for The Magnificent Ambersons (1919) and Alice Adams (1922), William Faulkner for A Fable (1955) and The Reivers (1963), and John Updike for Rabbit is Rich (1981) and Rabbit at Rest (1990).


The earliest-born winning authors were Edith Wharton (1862) and Booth Tarkington (1869) while the latest-born winners are Jhumpa Lahiri and Paul Harding both born in 1967 . The oldest living winning author is Herman Wouk (sounds like "woke") born in 1915. He won the Pulitzer in 1952 for The Caine Mutiny.


In my minor study of Pulitzer-winning authors, it has also been interesting to note their places of birth. Of the winners, 5 were born in New York City, 4 in Chicago, and 3 in Washington, DC. When the winners are analyzed by region of the country where they were born, it turns out that 24 were from Eastern states, 23 from Southern states, 22 from the Midwest, 4 from California, and 2 from Mountain West states (one from Colorado and one from Idaho). The West is under-represented except for the 4 from California. I will leave it to you to speculate on why Pulitzer winning authors are not likely to come from Western states.


The last point I want to make about Pulitzer winners is that many of them, like most good authors, write about that with which they are familiar or have experienced in their lives. I included Ernest Hemingway's picture at the beginning of this post to make the point. Hemingway wrote A Farewell to Arms about an American ambulance driver in the Italian army after having had that experience as a young man in 1918. Hemingway was foreign correspondent in Paris and ended up writing The Sun Also Rises. He served as war correspondent for American newspapers in the Spanish Civil War and then wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls; lived in Key West, Florida and wrote To Have and Have Not; spent time in Cuba and wrote his Pulitzer winning novel, The Old Man and the Sea.


Other Pulitzer winners used the same approach in writing about what they have experienced. Robert Olen Butler served in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War and wrote a novel about people from Vietnam during and after the war, A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (1992). John Steinbeck was born in Salinas, CA and wrote a number of novels that took place in and around Salinas including Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday. Julia Peterkin owned with her husband a plantation in South Carolina and wrote Scarlet Sister Mary, a novel about the former slaves who continued to live on the plantation years after the Civil War. James A. Michener was a historian in the U.S. Navy in WWII who served in the South Pacific as used the stories he learned of as the basis for his Pulitzer winner, Tales of the South Pacific. Herman Wouk served as an officer on a Navy minesweeper in the Pacific in WWII and then wrote his great novel, The Caine Mutiny, which took place on a minesweeper in the Pacific and examined the psychological well-being and fitness of the ship's commanding officer.


Pearl S. Buck spent most of her life in China with missionary parents and used the experience to write The Good Earth. Willa Cather was raised in Nebraska and studied at the University of Nebraska. Many of her well-known novels such as One of Ours, O Pioneers, and My Antonia describe life on the Nebraska plains. Jhumpa Lahiri was born to parents from India living in London, England and wrote her Pulitzer winner, Interpreter of Maladies about the experiences of people from India living there and in foreign lands. Oliver LaFarge was a Harvard-trained anthropologist who studied the Navajo culture in the Southwest and wrote a wonderful novel about the challenges to the culture in his Laughing Boy. T. S. Stribling grew up in Tennessee in the 1880's and heard his parents and relatives tell stories about the Civil War and then wrote a wonderful three-part series about the Civil War in Alabama and Tennessee: The Forge, The Store, and The Unfinished Cathedral. Stribling's father fought in the Union Army while his mother's people were Confederate soldiers. His treatment of the Civil War and the reconstruction were much more from the Northern perspective about slavery and the hardships of former slaves after the Civil War compared to Atlanta native Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind which was quite sympathetic to the Southern perspective on the Civil War, slavery, and the reconstruction. Harper Lee grew up as a tomboy in small town Alabama in the 1930's and went on to write To Kill a Mockingbird which explored racial equality in the legal system. Incidentally, her father was a lawyer in the small Alabama town and her close friend Truman Copote served as the model for Dill in her novel. Even the character Boo Radley was based on an actual person in the town. The practice of Pulitzer-winning authors to write about their own life experiences is still being carried on. The most recent winner of the Pulitzer for fiction, Paul Harding, wrote his novel, Tinkers, about a man who spent his life repairing clocks. It turns out that Harding's father was a repairer of clocks and Paul served as his apprentice.


It has been particularly interesting for me to gain greater appreciation and understanding of the works Pulitzer-winning authors by learning something of their background and life experiences. I hope this information on will add to your interest and enjoyment in reading the Pulitzer-winning authors.

So Big by Edna Ferber: Another recommendation for an early Pulitzer winner

In my last post I recommended five novels that won the Pulitzer 70 or more years ago but are now more or less lost and forgotten. After I finish reading one of the Pulitzer winners, I write my views and opinion about the book. This helps me process what I have read and decide what I think of it. I also do this writing in the hope that it might help you to decide whether or not to read the work. The Pulitzer Prize for fiction is given to an American author who preferably writes about the American experience. Given this guideline for the prize, after I have read a Pulitzer winner, I like to reflect on what aspects of American life have been dealt with in the novel, what I may have learned, and how my thinking about the American experience has been influenced by the work.



In this blog I want to share my thinking about Edna Ferber's So Big.




So Big by Edna Ferber, 1924
Won the Pulitzer Prize in 1925, Read in 2006

So Big tells the story of the transformation of American society in the late 19th century from agrarian to industrialized city living and to a more prosperous way of living. In some ways, think So Big has some parallels with The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck with the story moving from China to Chicago. In So Big a young woman, Selena Peake moves from Chicago to High Prairie in the farm land outside Chicago to be a school teacher, after her father dies and she has to support herself. Selena ends up marrying Pervus DeJong, a Dutch-American farmer, and has a son named Dirk. Selena calls her son “So Big” because when she asks him how big he is, Dirk spreads his arms and says, “so big.” Selena’s husband Pervus is a truck farmer who grows vegetables and hauls them to Chicago to sell them.

The story gets interesting after Pervus dies unexpectedly and Selena has to take over the truck farm. So Big (Dirk) works with his mother and plays by her side in the fields. Selena drives a horse-drawn wagon, leaving the farm early in the morning, and arriving in Chicago in time to claim a spot in the produce market. Dirk rides along with his mother on the weekly trip to market. Selena learns the truck farming business and becomes well-known for her excellent, clean vegetables.

This is where the similarity with The Good Earth comes in. Because Selena is so successful with her farm, she wants what’s best for Dirk and sends him to a good school. By now Dirk is tired of being called So Big and he is soon ready to leave High Prairie to be educated in Chicago. Wang Lung in The Good Earth did something similar with his sons when he became a prosperous farmer. It sounds like a good thing but what do the sons miss out on as they are having a good life handed to them with little effort on their own part? Dirk begins to enjoy big city life and goes on to college. Selena is in favor of this and wants Dirk to be an architect. She wants Dirk to create art through the buildings he will design. However, Dirk goes off to World War I and comes back having lost his interest in architecture and art. He found that he cannot earn enough money as an architect, so he went into banking. Dirk made good money as a banker selling bonds and was able to support his expensive lifestyle, trying to keep up with the wealthy friends he has made in Chicago. Meanwhile, Selena keeps on farming. She tries to get Dirk to see what is missing in his life but he has too many other things to attend to.

So Big gets me thinking about what has happened countless times as sons of successful parents fail to appreciate what those who went before them had to work for in order to be successful. Wang Lung’s sons enjoy the benefits of his hard work and then wait for him to die so they can divide up the property and sell it. It isn’t clear at the end of So Big what Dirk will do with what Selena has worked for. However, Selena has a sense of satisfaction and accomplishment with what she has done with her life given her difficult time of making a living when her husband died and left her with a small son. Where Selena devoted her life to building something, an excellent truck farm, Dirk seemed to want the good life and use wealth for pleasure. It seems like it takes very wise and tough parents to keep from spoiling or harming their children by the fruits of their own hard work and success.

Forgotten novels I discovered on the Pulitzer winners list

I love the earlier winners of the Pulitzer Prize. When I started finding out about winners for fiction, I had the pleasant experience of discovering some great novels that I had never heard of. Without my interest in the Pulitzer winners, I likely would never have learned of them. On the other hand, there are some very well-known early winners of the prize that we all know: The Age of Innocence (1920) by Edith Wharton, Arrowsmith (1925) by Sinclair Lewis, The Good Earth (1931) by Pearl S. Buck, Gone With the Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell, The Yearling (1938) by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck. It was interesting for me to discover that these novels that I had enjoyed reading had won the Pulitzer Prize.

Now for the novels that I had never heard of until I started searching for the Pulitzer winners. Here are the books that stand out for me as great winners of the Pulitzer that I discovered because they won the award. See how many of them you had heard of before you became interested in the Pulitzer winners.

One of Ours (1922) by Willa Cather

So Big (1924) by Edna Ferber

Scarlet Sister Mary (1928) by Julia Peterkin

Laughing Boy (1929) by Oliver LaFarge

The Store (1932) by T. S. Stribling

The picture at the top of this post shows my copy of each of these books and I am fortunate to have a 1st edition copy of all of them. The importance of literary awards has become clear to me as I realize that the novels listed above might go unnoticed by readers of good fiction if not for the Pulitzer Prize. For example, none of these novels was known to my wife or my daughter who were both English majors in college and avid readers after college.

So, if you are looking for a good Pulitzer winner to read, I highly recommend each of these five books. In future posts I will give my brief review and opinion of each these novels.

Selecting a Pulitzer to read

Title page and illustration from my 1918 edition of The Magnificent Ambersons

In this post I am going share some of my thoughts about selecting a Pulitzer winner to read. The image above is the title page of my copy of The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington. It was written in 1918 and won the Pulitzer for fiction in 1919. It was the second novel to win the award. I have a 1st edition copy of the book, the oldest in my Pulitzer collection. The first owner, Beatrice A. McCormick, wrote her name on the inside cover in 1919. I mention all this to make a point: I find it most enjoyable to read an early edition of the Pulitzer winners. For me it needs to be hardcover and maybe falling apart a little bit so you have to be careful with it. I like the large print on the soft old paper. The old edition feels good in my hands and I feel that I am able to go back in time more completely with the antique edition. Another benefit of the older editions is that they sometimes have wonderful illustrations, as you see in image of my copy of The Great Ambersons. Some collectors would not think of actually reading their rare, old edition of a book but I like the experience. My edition of The Magnificent Ambersons also has the original dustjacket and that is quite rare. The dustjacket adds greatly to the value of the book. However, when I read my old editions, I always remove the dustjacket, if my copy of the book has one. If you are interested in finding and possibly buying an old, rare edition of the early winners of the Pulitzer, my advice is to hurry. They are truly rare and often hard to find, especially if you want one in good condition with a dustjacket.

How do you find an old edition of a Pulitzer winner? I have spent many happy hours poking around in used bookstores across the U.S. I have found some treasures that way but the bookstore owners usually know what the book is worth. So, you don't often pick up an early edition for less than it is worth. However, I have been lucky to buy some early editions for a low price. I paid only $25.00 for my 1st edition of The Magnificent Ambersons. I love finding used bookstores in the cities I visit, from Boston to Jacksonville, Florida and New York to San Francisco and Los Angeles. The French Quarter in New Orleans may be my favorite book hunting grounds because there are 8 to 10 used bookstores within easy walking distance of each other in the Quarter. Some of my best bargains have been in used bookstores in Utah and I think it's because fewer collectors have been there before me.

The other way I have acquired many of my old and rare editions is through online sales. I recommend going to the AbeBooks.com website at http://www.abebooks.com/
AbeBooks.com lists used and new books that can be ordered online from bookstores across the U.S. You can search for the book you want and specify an early edition and a dustjacket. But don't be surprised if the list price is $1000 or more. You pay more for a 1st edition of a book with a dustjacket that is in mint condition. I saw listed a copy of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck for $10,000. It was tempting but I knew I couldn't explain the purchase or hide it from my wife, so I settled for a lot less expensive edition.

If you don't feel that you can purchase a copy of an early edition of one of the Pulitzer winners, don't let this keep you from reading them. I recommend trying your local library. I actually got started reading older editions of older novels by borrowing an early edition of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, a novel written by Betty Smith in 1943. My daughter had checked it out from the library and I read it while I was visiting in her home. The look and feel of this old edition of a great novel that probably should have won the Pulitzer but did not gave me my start in reading and enjoying the old editions. By the way, I now have my own 1st edition copy of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn that I found in a used bookstore for $5.00. So check the library if you want a reading experience that is, in my opinion, better than reading a new paperback edition of a great old novel. And if you can, try finding your own copy of an old edition of a Pulitzer winner. I haven't found and bought all of them.

Some of my thoughts on leisure reading and Following the Thread

In my leisure reading over the years, I have generally found two types of books. There are books like The Yearling that are written in a way that makes me want to savor every word and a story that is compelling and beautiful as it unfolds. In The Yearling the story flows along with few excursions into material that might "sidetrack" me as I read. I know I'm getting into tricky territory now as I write about what I like in leisure reading. But remember, this is about my opinion. Your opinion may be quite different. Maybe you like to read a novel that explores the sidetracks as well as a flowing story.

Now that I have described my reading of The Yearling, I'll talk about a different kind of book, still fiction but different from the kind that sweeps you along on a story line with few excursions. Some years ago I read Moby-Dick by Herman Melville. This is considered one of the greatest works of American fiction and is well-worth reading. That said, I also have to point out that Moby-Dick is a good example of one of those novels that takes the reader on long excursions into rather lengthy discourses on many subjects having to do with whales and the whaling industry of the 19th century. For example, Melville gives the reader 11 pages of material on various kinds of pictures of whales and whaling, from engravings to paintings on wood. This sidetrack, if you wish to see it as such, comes in the middle of an interesting account of Captain Ahab's pursuit of the great white whale. It became a bit frustrating for me to be reading the interesting story and then be switched over to a lengthy treatise on pictures of whales or any number of other topics.

So, here is how I ended up reading Moby-Dick. I call this kind of pleasure reading "Following the Thread." I decide after starting a book like Moby-Dick that there is a thread of a good story that I want to follow. So, I set my purpose in reading to follow that story and enjoy the reading experience. I read the first chapter or two to discover the setting, plot, characters, and general idea of the book. By this point I have probably seen the author's intent as it was with Melville, to educate the reader on many aspects of whales and whaling as well as to tell the story. If I decide that my purpose in reading is to enjoy the story, I start following the thread and skimming through parts that strike me as excursions into areas that are not crucial to pursuing the story. I skim, which for me means to quickly glance over what is written and to search for where the story thread starts again. Once I find the thread, I read more carefully to enjoy the story. When the side excursion begins again, I start skimming once again in order to pick up the thread of the story. The way I read depends on my purpose and I find following the thread to be a flexible approach to reading when my purpose is to enjoy a good story.

The following the thread strategy helped me read Moby-Dick in about half the time it would have taken me to read it all straight through. I am currently using following the thread with American Pastoral by Philip Roth which won the Pulitzer in 1998. This book has a thread of a story that is embedded in a lot of material that strikes me as uninteresting and not very crucial to the story. I want to finish American Pastoral and get the satisfaction of the story Roth is telling but I can't handle the sidetracks. I know when I am encountering too many sidetracks because I feel like giving up on a novel. At that point I stop and ask myself if the story is worth experiencing and if it is the sidetracks that are leading me to want to quit. If both of these points is true, I then decide my purpose is to read the story and I start following the thread.

Before I leave my discussion of following the thread, I would like to add that the strategy might apply to academic or professional reading as well as to leisure reading. In non-leisure reading, I find myself skimming through material and sampling what is there and then picking up on the thread of the most relevant material in the piece I am reading. Again, it all depends on my purpose and having a clear purpose in reading strikes me as the best way to decide how I am going to read anything from a professional journal article to the sports page in the newspaper. I hope this excursion into following the thread has been a worthwhile sidetrack for you. Happy purpose-directed reading!